Our technologies shape us

As the world around us changes, we need new technology and improved interaction to help us. But what causes the world to change? The very technology that we introduce.

I saw this quote stuck up on the wall of a furniture shop the other day.

It set me thinking: if you replace “homes” with “technology” you get an insight into the business of interaction design.

Hitting a moving target

Good interaction designers know that their job is never done. As people adopt a new technology, their behaviour changes. And the technology needs to change with them, if its going to stay useful.

When everyone has a mobile phone, we discover we like sending text messages.

Multi-tap is a bit cumbersome for creating text messages. So predictive text helps us send more texts faster.

Blogs are great. But we can’t keep up. So we subscribe via RSS.

We can’t keep up with RSS. So we use an RSS ticker to help me stay on top of the flood.

We’re stuck in front of computers all day so Twitter helps us stay in touch with our friends and family.

We need the best quality information to be filtered from the noise. So Digg and Delicious help us share attention and opinion data.

We have lots of information available to us but we discover we want to mix and match it. So RDF, promises the next evolution, along with interfaces like Ubiquity and Aurora.

I think there’s a recurring theme here:

Information technology empowers people to produce more information more quickly. (SMS, Predictive text, Blogs, Twitter, HTML, IM, Ubiquity…)Information technology protects us from the flood of information we have been empowered to produce. (RSS, Digg, Google, Technorati, Aurora?…)